M2M is short for “machine to machine (Machine to Machine)” or “man to machine (Man to Machine)” communication, and mainly refers to transferring information by using a “communication network” to implement data exchange from a machine to another machine or from a man to a machine, that is, implementing interconnection and interworking between machines by using the communication network. On a mobile communication network, a terminal side does not require manual cabling because of the particularity of the network. Therefore, mobility support may be provided, which helps reduce costs and may meet communication requirements in a dangerous environment. Therefore, an M2M service using the mobile communication network as a bearer arouses industry-wide concern and is widely used in fields such as security detection, mechanical service and repair business, public transport system, fleet management, industrial automation, and city informatization.
To centrally manage M2M devices and M2M applications, a network application creates an M2M group on an M2M platform. The network applications include authorized entities such as an electric power company, a taxi company, and an environment monitoring department. The M2M group may be an industry application group, for example, a metering terminal group, a vehicle-mounted device group, or a sensor group. According to different capabilities and deployment positions of terminals, group members (MEMBERs) in the group may directly access the platform, and may also access the platform through different gateways; in addition, according to different service features of the terminals, the group members in the group may perform access from a fixed position, and a position change or an access point handover may also occur.
When an authorized entity requests access to the group members in the group, the platform may deliver an access request to all of the group members according to a group definition. After receiving the request, all of the group members return a response, where the response may include returned data and changed status. However, in group communication, the number of group members may be extremely large. Therefore, if the M2M platform delivers the requests to all of the group members, a high signaling overhead may be caused, thereby affecting group communication efficiency. For example, for the electric power company application that needs to collect electricity consumption of thousands of users in several residential communities, after receiving a request of the electric power company application, an electric power company platform needs to deliver electricity consumption reporting requests to all of the users, and receive, from all of the users, responses respond to the request, thereby causing high overhead.